He had done it on purpose, she was convinced! On purpose to outrage her!
“Wherever I meet them first,” she said between her teeth: “if it be at a Drawing-room—I will cut them both dead!”
“What is the matter, Sourisette?” asked one of her women friends who was staying with her and approached as Daddy withdrew.
“You may well ask me. My brother has married the lowest of low women!”
“How very dreadful for you!” said the lady with sympathy. “But are you quite sure? Because when I came away from England last week they said he was going to marry Miss Massarene, the daughter of your good old friend Billy.”
Mouse shuddered within herself. She could not hear the name of William Massarene without a spasm of unbearable remembrance, and she felt that her attitude of hostility was difficult to explain.
“He has married her. That is just the horror of it!” she said between her teeth. “You know what they all were, the lowest of the low. As acquaintances while they had their money, they were all very well: but as a connection—it is too frightful! I will never speak to her—never, never, not if I meet her at Osborne or Windsor.”
A servant at that moment brought her telegrams from Carrie Wisbeach, and various other members of her family, all repeating the news and reflecting her own views with regard to it.
Such a mésalliance! If the money had been there it would have been a most admirable alliance, a most suitable arrangement, a most excellent choice; but when the money was all gone back to the poor from whom it had been extracted originally, the union was positively monstrous. If he had married a pauper out of the county workhouse, it would have been less insult to them; so they all agreed.
There is a kind of cynical frankness about “good society,” with regard to its love of money, which is, perhaps, the only candid thing about it. It sticks like a swarm of bees where money is, and it vanishes like locusts before the north wind where it is not.